Fwd: Minutes of Dec. 2nd Meeting

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
MC-574
College of Applied Life Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL  61820

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

WWW: http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/
WWW: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jongund/www/

attached mail follows:

travis roth -- tr
jon gunderson – jg
susan crayne -- sc
dave pullman -- dp
peter  korn     -- pk
will pearson -- wp

jg -- Any additional comments on SVG 1.2?  There was a teleconference,
which discussed the comments.  Consensus was that document would be
forwarded on to the SVG working group.  We could have a dialog with them at
some point -- perhaps at the meeting in March.

dp -- I discussed SVG1.2 with others -- there was a meta-discussion about
what constitutes an appropriate form of info provided to the user.  Is raw
data sufficient or should there be some sort of auditory cuing for special
navigation or whether it should be semantic.  One example:  If I’m told
that a graph is this and they put up an equation, that doesn't help.  You
need to know that it is a graph and what the lines are.

jg -- In MathML, people could generate graphs and things instead of just
looking at the equation.  It's not clear what you have to do to allow
equations to be computational.  No other comments about SVG?  If you have
comments, put in the header "adjusted changes" or "document revision".

jg -- Let's move on to the face-to-face meeting 2/28 - 3/4.

pk -- Is there a website for this meeting?

jg -- Who could come?  Peter and somebody from Beijing team?

pk -- A lot depends on whether we could work on User Agent Issues.

jg -- IBM should get together with Sun on Mozilla keyboard stuff.

pk -- I'd like to get an idea of the other parts of the agenda.

jg -- On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, the working groups get
together.  Wednesday is an all day plenary event.  Architectural or process
issues are discussed.  Last year they talked about test suites.  They have
speakers from working groups come and talk.  It's a day to think bigger
than your working group.  The theme of W3C for past 3 or 4 years has been,
as you produce specs, how do people start using them?  A big problem (and
CSS was the poster child for this), there were specs, but browser
implementations were poor, so people would try to use the spec but it
didn't work.  So W3C has become more interesting in QA -- that's one of the
reasons that the UA group has test suites.

pk -- That doesn't tell me which working groups have meetings.

jg -- That's still being organized.  We've already missed the cutoff date
to say that our group wants to meet with another group.  We could piggyback
with PF (Protocols and Formats) because they already have a slot with SVG.
Peter, what would you like to see covered if we met as a working group?

pk -- I don't have well-formulated ideas. We've done a lot with the
keyboard navigation.  The next step is to figure out who will implement
which features in Mozilla.  We need to also figure out what to do with
applets, embedding, or iframes.

jg -- Maybe we should have a meeting with PF on this.  We would like to
integrate accessibility into the SVG test suites.  Scaling presentations is
one of the UAG requirements.  A lot of the info that we have in our
comments to the SVG group are things that we want to see as a part of test
suites. We need to get the SVG working group thinking about accessibility.
Will, maybe you can help us build up our SVG test suites.  I think right
now, and why SVG is so important to UAG, people have an idea of how HTML
deals with this.  People think as long as they have access to the DOM they
can do anything they want.  Unless we can add extensions to Mozilla or
Firefox, what I'd like to see is if we can work with SVG to get more of a
common platform.  If we can provide interfaces that everyone can share in
common, as an author I can check my conditional content even if I can't
test it.

wp -- I was looking at a forum for Visual Studio 2005 and they were talking
about changing the text colors.  These people didn't have any disabilities
but wanted to see things in finer detail.

jg -- Availability of many display resolutions makes it necessary to do
text scaling.  I guess what we want to do with SVG is I think it's a good
place for UAG to expend some of our resources.  We want to try to work with
them and show them how UAG applies to their document.  If there are
shortcomings in UAG, we can work on adding those requirements into the
document.  Two topics for face-to-face:  1.  Meeting with SVG, about 1
hour, and 2.  We should talk with PF about applets, object navigation,
dynamic HTML.  I'll put together a draft agenda by Monday and send it out
to the list for people to look at.

jg -- Ok, anything else on the plenary?  Will, do you think you'd have an
opportunity to get there?

wp  -- I might -- I'm trying to put together a research trip.  I should be
able to.

jg -- Susan, could you come?

sc -- I don't think so.

jg -- David, would you be able to come?

dp -- I don't think I'll be able to come.

pk -- I can't make a commitment for the folks in Beijing.

jg -- Keyboard test suites for Mozilla.  I've made a little bit of progress
on that in the last week.  There's a test character page and an input page.
I'm starting to work on frames and iframes.  For the left character
command, I've added a new column to the left character function.  There's a
new column called link to test page.  One of the things I noticed about the
caret in Firefox and Mozilla -- if there is an internal link sometimes it
gets stuck.

pk  --  What versions of Mozilla have you been trying?

jg --  Just 1.7.  I understand Beijing has newer versions.

pk -- Yes.

jg -- Is that for Solaris?

pk -- It's actually for Linux.

jg -- I just bought a Sun Blade.  Now all I need is a keyboard.  I'm going
to try to get it set up and look at some of the things you are working on
for Solaris, Peter.  We probably have Solaris 9 on the machine.  The person
who has the machine is blind.

pk -- Then they'll definitely want Solaris 10.

jg -- We have another person who is blind and uses a Sun, and we'd like to
get him up on it too.

jg -- For Monday's meeting with Beijing we can go over some of these edge
issues like iframes.  It's not clear what would happen in that
circumstance.

pk -- We haven't come up with a proposed solution.

jg -- Do you have any applets you could send me that are accessible?

pk -- If you have the Sun JRE and JDK, the /demo/jfc/applet or japplet
directory contains one or two accessible Swing applets.

jg -- I need to get the development version of Java, not just the runtime.

pk -- Yes the development version comes with examples.

jg -- Does Quicktime play in Unix?

pk -- Yes, but Quicktime doesn't have any accessible players.  The thing to
look at is Helix player, which is accessible.  Other than 2 small bugs,
Helix player looks remarkably accessible.  The first bug is significant.
It doesn't recognize the desktop accessibility tags.   Also the buttons do
not have accessible names.  I hope that we will have these ironed out soon
and have a very accessible player.  Real Player 10 is based on Helix Player
1.

jg -- Any other comments about the test suite stuff?  Do people want to
work on them?  The last thing on our agenda is the UAG test suites.  Matt
has had some contact with Microsoft.  Hopefully we'll have some updated
implementation reports soon.  Will, would you be interested in working on
the SVG test suites?

wp -- Which version, 1.1 or 1.2?

jg -- We could create a test suite for 1.1, and one for the 1.2 changes.
Is Batik still being developed for SVG?

wp -- I think so.

jgunderson -- Are there other companies working on SVG too?

wp -- I have a problem with specification formats

jg -- W3C has their own way of formatting specifications

pk -- Quick question -- which Sun Blade did you buy?

jg -- 1500, Sparc 3 chip.  It should be a pretty good machine, I'm told.

pk  -- Next meeting with Beijing is this coming Monday?

jg -- I should send out a notice today.

Action item:  Jon Gunderson to talk to Al Gilman about the plenary session.






Susan

Accessibility Research
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY  10532  USA

914-784-7713
8-863-7713